{"id":512906,"date":"2026-04-04T17:37:27","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T17:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/512906\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T17:37:27","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T17:37:27","slug":"what-jonathan-the-tortoise-can-teach-us-about-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/512906\/","title":{"rendered":"What Jonathan the tortoise can teach us about fake news"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Why did they pick on Jonathan the tortoise?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not good to make up news about any sort of death, but when it comes to animals, people can be even more sympathetic than usual. Perhaps the poster thought that making up a story about an animal as well-known as Jonathan the tortoise would encourage more people to send donations, although this can&#8217;t be proven.<\/p>\n<p>We do know that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/bitesize\/articles\/zqxbqyc\" class=\"ssrcss-xqky4h-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">animal posts and videos<\/a> are incredibly popular. On TikTok alone there are 72.1m videos with the #cat and 28.2m marked #cats<\/p>\n<p>A study by the University of Leeds in 2020 showed that we love cat videos because they have an emotional appeal (lots of us think cats are adorable balls of fluff), we can relate to it (cats are a popular pet) and that makes them very shareable &#8211; there are more than 200m Instagram posts with the hashtag #catsofinstagram<\/p>\n<p>#tortoisesofinstagram is at 519k posts &#8211; but perhaps Jonathan&#8217;s current wave of popularity can change all that.<\/p>\n<p>This article was published in April 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why did they pick on Jonathan the tortoise? It&#8217;s not good to make up news about any sort&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-512906","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}